Last, but not least, we have the great stimulus given to higher education by the passage of Mr. Birrell's Irish University Act. For a whole generation the progress of higher education in Ireland has been held up by a barren and wearisome religious quarrel. Now that quarrel has vanished, and Ireland is organising a great system of University education for her Catholic as well as her Protestant youth. Not the least stimulating experience of the Eighty Club in Ireland was the day which we spent, under the guidance of the distinguished Principal, at Cork University College, where we saw Catholics and Protestants, men and women, young and old, working together in friendly harmony in the splendid buildings which have sprung up to house the undergraduates of the south-west. The same process is going on at Dublin, Galway, and Belfast. The machinery is being rapidly prepared for training up in the best possible atmosphere of mutual tolerance the new rulers of Home Rule Ireland. * * * * * Such have been the great Acts of Parliament which have created a changed situation in Ireland. But the crown is still wanting to the work. Those who travel in Ireland and make any close inquiry into the work of these Acts must feel that there is a great gap unfilled. It is a gap at the top. All these new roads of reform are well and truly laid--but they all lead nowhere. Take one startling fact. Two Commissions of late years have considered the great and glaring need of Ireland in the want of swift, cheap, and convenient transport both for persons and goods. One of these Commissions was on Canals, and the other on Railways. Both decided in favour of national control. But as there is no national authority which anyone trusts, both reports have been stillborn.[34] It was probably some such facts that led, as far back as August, 1903, to the uprising among the more moderate Unionist Irishmen of a remarkable movement which is still affecting Ireland. This movement took shape in a body; called the Irish Reform Association, presided over, like the Land Conference, by that remarkable Irish peer Lord Dunraven. That Conference put forward a set of proposals which are now historical, and which have since, in varying forms, inspired the movement for what is popularly known as "Devolution."[35] Mild as are the proposals of this new party, they do not differ in principle from the proposals of the Home Rulers.